This assignment is for ETC5521 Assignment 1 by Team Koala comprising of Putu Saputra and Vinny Vu.

1 Introduction and motivation

In today’s day and age there has been a strong push for the reduction in production and use of fossil fuels. Per Peninsula Energy fossil fuels “produce a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide methane,” Energy (2018) These greenhouse gas emissions are known to be a main contributor to the ‘greenhouse effect’ “the warming of climate that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth towards space,” Twardy et al. (2007) Not only does thermal power produced by fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases, it is not renewable, meaning it cannot be “replaced naturally in a short period of time” resulting in long-term price volatility and unsustainability.

Per Our World Data Europe is currently the 3rd highest consumer of primary energy behind Asia pacific and North America making up approximately 15% of the total World Energy Consumption Ritchie and Roser (2014).

As a result, the European power sector currently plays a crucial role in attaining targets to “cut green-house gases by 40% by 2030, compared to 1990” Energiewende and Sandbag (2018) in favor cleaner, renewable energy sources. For the purposes of this analysis we will be using Eurostat European Energy data (Eurostat, 2020) assess how successful they currently are and answer the question:

How sustainable is the energy production in Europe?

Specifically:

Which countries have the highest production of sustainable energy based on energy types?
How do energy imports vs exports compare between countries in Europe from 2016-2018?
How the contributions of the sources to the production of electricity?

2 Data description

The data in the tidytuesday package is taken from Eurostat that contains the electricity production of the countries in the European Union. The data is given in tabular form in two tables, country_totals and energy_types. The energy_types table containing the types of energy produced by each country. The country_totals table contains the brake down energy supplied by each country.

The variables in the energy_types table are included below in Table 2.1:

Table 2.1: Energy types variables
variable	class	description
country	character	Country ID
country_name	character	Country name
type	character	Type of energy production
level	character	Level - either total, level 1 or level 2. Where level 2 makes up level 1 that makes up the total
year	numeric	Year of observation
energy	numeric	Energy in GWh (Gigawatt hours)

The variables in the country_totals table are included below in Table 2.2:

Table 2.2: Country total variables
variable	class	description
country	character	Country ID
country_name	character	Country name
type	character	Type of energy production
level	character	Level - either total, level 1 or level 2. Where level 2 makes up level 1 that makes up the total
year	numeric	Year of observation
energy	numeric	Energy in GWh (Gigawatt hours)

The data in the tidytuesday package only contains yearly totals from 2016-2018. Hughes (2020) However, monthly data can be found on the Eurostat website including data from 2010 until May 2020 as at 14-08-20. The statistics are collected and compiled by Member States. Eurostat prepared a template to gather this information. Eurostat (n.d.)

3 Analysis and findings

3.1 Which countries have the highest production of sustainable energy based on energy types?

To assess which countries lead in renewable energy production we have used the energy_types table to make a bar plot in Figure 3.1. The bar plot shows the average production of renewable energy in the positive y-axis and average conventional thermal energy on the negative y-axis. The average across the 3 years was used as the individual plots for 2016-2018 did not show much variation due to the relatively short period of time. From the plot we can see France, Germany, Spain, Norway and Sweden lead Europe in the production of renewable energy, with France producing almost an average 500,000 GWh a year with Nuclear making up the majority of the renewable energy production. France also has a significantly small level of conventional thermal energy production compared to renewable energy. Although Germany is second leading producer of renewable energy, they are also the leading European producer of conventional thermal energy producing almost 363,000 GWh of energy per year.

Figure 3.1: Average Renewable vs Non-Renewable Energy Production from 2016-2018

To look closer at European energy production across the 3 years the plot in 3.2 shows the breakdown of the total production of each energy type for each year. For comparability between total renewable and non-renewable energy production a total renewable column is added. From the graph we can see the production of renewable energy exceeds the production thermal energy across all years. Notably nuclear energy leads the production of renewable energy with France being a leading producer. Conventional thermal energy still however contributes to just under 50% of energy production. From 3.1, although there are several countries with renewable energy greatly exceeding fossil fuels several countries such as Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Turkey show high levels of conventional thermal energy production.

Figure 3.2: Total Energy Production by Type and Year

3.2 How do energy imports vs exports compare between countries in Europe from 2016-2018?

Per Our World Data Europe only makes up 15% of the total World Energy Consumption Ritchie and Roser (2014). Therefore, to assess the global impact of Europe’s renewable energy production we are interested in assessing the energy imports and exports of each country. Using the country_totals we have created the plot in Figure 3.3 showing the average exports on the positive y-axis and imports on the negative y-axis for each country across 2016-2018. Further points were added to visualize the net export less imports with the size of the point representing the total net production. We have decided to use the average across 2016-2018 as there is not a significant change in energy exports and imports across the 3 years.

From the visualization we can see Germany, France, Sweden, Norway and Czechia are the leading 5 countries in net exports less imports. Furthermore from the first visualization Figure 3.1 these countries lead Europe in the production of renewable energy with Germany and France being Europe’s largest total net producer of energy showing signs of not only the production of renewable energy for local use but net exportation of renewable energy also. Further, from the visualization we can see Italy, Finland, United, Kingdom, Hungry and Belgium lead in net imports (imports greater than exports) in Europe.

Figure 3.3: Average Export and Imports by Country 2016-2018

To look at Europe’s net export-imports as a whole Table 3.1 shows summary of the total energy production levels across each year. From the table in 2016 and 2017 Europe is at a net export but in 2018 they are at a net import. This drop in 2018 is due to the spike in imports and drop in export in 2018. It should be noted there is a drop in total net production in 2018 suggesting reduced energy consumption supporting reduction of consumption of fossil fuels.

Table 3.1: European Energy Production Summary 2016-2018
year	Total net production	Energy supplied	Energy absorbed by pumping	Exports	Imports	Net export-imports
2016	3751480	3705898	45219.34	407931.9	407569.4	362.500
2017	3788720	3736768	47048.09	416921.2	412016.9	4904.346
2018	3737693	3714732	41142.85	412391.8	430573.7	-18181.938

3.3 Energy types contribution to total energy production for each country in Europe

To get the energy proportion, the method we use is to divide the total energy by type by the total energy production. The results obtained are in the form of a percentage. The 3.4 figure shows the percentage of the contribution of energy types to the total electricity production in Europe for three years of observation (2016,2017,2018). The graph produced using plotly package. Sievert (2020) From the data shown on the graph, in general, there are differences in the contribution of each energy type. Thermal energy is still the most massive supply, with nearly 50% of total European production. Nuclear energy outperforms three renewable energy sources Hydro, Wind, and Solar by more than 20%. Geothermal and other energy sources are the type of energy with the smallest contribution by not reaching 1%.

Figure 3.4: The proportion of each energy type to the total energy production in Europe

Now let us look at the presentation of the energy types for each country in Figure 3.5 In general, the majority of countries in Europe rely on thermal energy as the leading supplier of energy needs in their country. However, it is interesting that Albania relies almost mostly on hydropower. The same situation occurs in Norway and Georgia which rely on hydro over than 80%. Meanwhile, The energy intake in France, Slovakia, and Hungary are dominated by nuclear power. France which has 58 nuclear power reactors is the highest country with almost 71% nuclear contribution for its country. IAEA (n.d.) While Slovakia and Hungary more than 50% nuclear energy contribution. Denmark is the country with the most significant wind power utilization with nearly 48%, followed by Lithuania and Ireland. As for solar energy, many have adopted it, but the percentage is still small. Italy utilise solar about 8% and Greece around 7.7%. Not many countries use geothermal, only Italy and Turkey with around 2% percentage.

Figure 3.5: The proportion of each energy type to the total energy production in each country in 3 years

The interesting part if we look at Malta, who did not get a full production of energy. After we check the dataset, found out that the total amount of net production is not equal by sum of energy types production in observation year. As seen in Table 3.2, Malta did not list any energy type in 2018 except Conventional Thermal. So that there is an insufficient value when we calculate the contributions.

Table 3.2: Energy type of Malta in 2016-2018
country_name	year	Conventional thermal	Wind	Solar	Total
Malta	2016	680.000	0.000	127.160	807.160
Malta	2017	1439.156	0.058	155.245	1594.459
Malta	2018	1716.490	0.000	0.000	1888.398

4 Conclusion

From our analysis we can see France, Germany, Spain, Norway and Sweden are some of the countries that lead the European production of renewable energy with nuclear being the most prominent renewable energy produced. Across all three years the total renewable energy produced exceeds the total conventional thermal energy produced with 2018 being the highest year. However, although this shows positive signs in the movement towards renewable energy, conventional thermal energy still dominates production in many European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom making just under half the total energy production across Europe across all three years.

When assessing the exports to imports of energy across Europe we can see France and Germany lead in next exports also being the leading countries in renewable energy production. However, when assessing year to year we can see 2018 showed a net importation of energy compared to the net exportation in 2016 and 2017.

The energy type contribution of each country is still dominated by conventional thermal. Although some countries supply electricity in their country with renewable energy like Albania with hydro and wind power from Denmark. Solar provides a small percentage of energy supply, but several countries have implemented it.

References

Energiewende, Agora, and Sandbag. 2018. “The European Power Sector in 2017.” State of Affairs; Review of Current Developments. https://ember-climate.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/EU-power-sector-report-2017.pdf.

Energy, Peninsula Clean. 2018. “What Is the Difference Between Clean and Renewable Energy?” Peninsula Clean Energy. https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/faq-items/what-is-the-difference-between-clean-and-renewable-energy/.

Eurostat. n.d. “Methodology.” Eurostat. Accessed August 26, 2020. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/energy/methodology.

Hughes, Ellis. 2020. “TidytuesdayR: Access the Weekly ’Tidytuesday’ Project Dataset.” https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidytuesdayR.

IAEA. n.d. “Country Nuclear Power Profiles.” IAEA. Accessed August 27, 2020. https://cnpp.iaea.org/countryprofiles/France/France.htm.

Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. 2014. “Energy.” Our World in Data, March. https://ourworldindata.org/energy.

Sievert, Carson. 2020. Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with R, Plotly, and Shiny. Chapman; Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com.

Twardy, Susan, Cindy Starr, Sarah DeWitt, and Maria Frostic. 2007. “Greenhouse Gases Effect on Global Warming.” Conceptual Image Lab. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20114.

ETC5521 Assignment 1